THB #535: Podcasts & Oft-Repeated Unrealities

I really, really like and admire John August and Craig Mazin. Earnestly. Industry veterans… thinkers… sharers… and yes, podcasters.

I don’t know what I read this morning that pointed me towards Scriptnotes, their early-adapted podcast series that was amongst the first I ever listened to back in the day, now offering its 642nd episode, entitled, “It’s Brutal Out Here.” I am not a big podcast listener. Honestly, most of them are so self-indulgent or narrowly focused or just plain boring that I don’t have the patience. I already don’t have the time for public radio that I used to enjoy so much. I listen to very specific episodes that I am drawn to for whatever reason.

Anyway…

In many areas, these two know more than I will ever know. But on the business side, not so much. Their podcast that I listened to today underscored my frustration these days, as the industry continues to panic - now for well over a year - and some of the fundamental ideas about where we are and how we got here remain, simply, incorrect.

The discussion I am focusing on is from about the 18 minute mark to the 49th minute of the podcast. The focus of the discussion is mostly how bad things seem to be for writers, now more than 6 months after the WGA strike ended.

Upfront, there is an acknowledgement that the market for television and film screenwriting has contracted severely. This is 100% correct. And was, sadly, predictable before the strike. I maintain that one reason the AMPTP companies literally refused to negotiate for months was because they chose to shut down the industry to cover some portion of the contraction, which was planned for and had even started at some companies before the strike happened. My take was that the industry was, at the top of 2023, looking at a 30% contraction in filmed entertainment being made… and that the strike period covered for 10% to 15% of that. In retrospect, the contraction may be more like 40%… let’s hope the bottom rises before we get there.

The podcast then turns to a story in Harper’s called, The Life and Death of Hollywood, written by Daniel Besner. Lots of people in the industry read the piece. The problem is that it is really well researched… and conflates many, many things that take them from being accurate facts to wildly misleading analysis.

For starters, it leads with a story about the show Dickinson, which was on AppleTV+. It’s a first-hand account of the series’ creator and showrunner, Alena Smith. And I have no doubt that every word and story she offered was 100% true. The problem is that many of her issues are very specific to AppleTV+. Anyone I have ever spoken to about AppleTV+ has had stories to tell about how very quirky it has been and often continues to be, though even more so in its first years.

But Besner, “a contributing editor at Jacobin and an associate professor at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies,” conflates her very specific - and eventually successful - experience with the plight of writers as a whole… which is inherently inaccurate.

Besner’s prances through the evolution of cable, VHS, and DVD like they were all kind of the same… and they were not remotely the same. Facts as simple as the history of Viacom as offered inaccurately. Viacom was actually a division of CBS that was spun away from CBS in 1971, because networks were disallowed from the syndication business. Viacom launched Showtime in 1976, then sold half of it off in 1979, then bought that half back in 1982, then merged it with The Movie Channel in 1983, creating an entity it would co-own with Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. However, the Department of Justice got involved and Paramount and Universal ended up out and Viacom split it with Warners and an AMEX/Warners partnership.

The point of explaining this isn’t to make your eyes cross, but to express that Besner’s easy leaps from The Paramount Decrees to The Reagan Era to Conglomeratization of Hollywood are simply too simple.

“In 1994, in an unprecedented deal, cable giant Viacom merged with retailer Blockbuster Video, and took over Paramount Pictures.” Sumner Redstone didn’t buy Viacom until 1987. And yes, though the Paramount deal started in 1993, both it and Blockbuster closed in 1994. But it would be 5 more years until Redstone brought CBS and Viacom back together from where they started 23 years earlier.

The corporate history of the film and television industry since the breakdown of the classic studio system in the late 60s/early 70s is rife with giant, stupid mistakes. Universal had 5 owners, I believe the count is, over a couple decades before settling in with Comcast almost 15 years ago. Mel Brooks was calling Gulf & Western, which bought Paramount in , “Engulf & Devour” in Silent Movie in 1976.

Besner makes some good points and offers some good facts… but stuff like shoving together the Pixar/Marvel/Lucasfilm acquisitions by Disney with Fox is just like comparing buying a motorcycle to buying a house… same with the idea that NBCUniversal was somehow an independent company when Comcast bought it or that this was equivalent to the combined company eventually buying DreamWorks Animation. I find this broadly disqualifying.

August and Mazin do separate out some pieces of the article from others. Here is a quotation they like:

“It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” (Alena) Smith said. “But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.”

I have no objection with agreements with this statement from the side of the artists.

But on the business side, both men seem to acknowledge that they don’t understand what studios were “chasing” with these massive spends with the launch of their legacy-based streamers.

Well, I am here to remind you that this is not a mystery. It was not art that they were chasing. And in the bigger picture, it was not subscribers they were chasing, though the literally were chasing subscriber count.